


Important Lessons

by Icie



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Final Haikyuu Quest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 18:44:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2822357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/pseuds/Icie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don't summon Eldrich abominations. Don't summon Eldrich abominations with ancient runes, don't summon Eldrich abomonations with pentagrams. Just. Don't do it, okay, promise?</p><p>Final Haikyuu Quest au, where Sugawara is a part time dark mage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Important Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ideallyqualia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideallyqualia/gifts).



> for the haikyuu!! winter holidays exchange! i really hope you like it, and have an excellent holiday, or if you don't that this helps improve it a little
> 
> i kind of feel that i should label this a final haikyuu quest au au because i've changed their world a little but it's very much in the spirit of it i feel!

Suga blinks at the nightmare in front of him. He thinks that shadow is looking at him. Today should have gone better.

\----

Hours ago, he set out from his cottage in the forest to the school. The headmaster decided that it was time for some of the older students to understand just what happens if they dabble in powers outside their control. Generally speaking, it's superfluous. Living with an evil demon overlord dangling over the kingdom and occasionally coming down from his castle to summon horrors beyond measure illustrates that point nicely. But there are always one or two students in a year who don't put two and two together. Suga was one of them back in his day. He was smart about it, though. So things worked out.

The students in this class make Suga's smile stretch wide and pained. Their usual magical defence teacher, Sawamura "please call me Daichi"-san, stands next to him with his teeth gritted and a vein throbbing in his temple.

"I just don't see why we can't just go _shwoop_ and _kablam_ and take down anything that comes at us if we get it wrong," says one student with orange hair and a sword strapped to his hip - which can't be comfortable when he has a whole morning of classroom lessons before he gets out to use it.

"That's because-" Suga starts, because at least he can debunk that.

But a different student cuts in with a derisive noise and says, "Idiot, what makes you think _you_ could get rid of something like that?" This one has a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. Suga is surprised he doesn't have his bow strung.

"Because my sword is magic, duh," says the first student.

Suga's hand twitches. He can see that sword and its sheath. There are rocks with more magic. Actually fairly impressive, now he thinks about it. Most things have at least a little magic in them but that sword might actually have negative magical potential.

Sawamura-san puts his hand on Suga's shoulder with a shake of his head. Apparently this happens a lot. "That's not really the point," Suga says to try and get the lesson back on track. "Even if you could destroy what you summoned, you don't know that there wouldn't be parts lingering and causing further damage." This is where he wanted to provide a demonstration, but Sawamura-san made it very clear that his pupils would take even the slightest hint that he can control black magic as proof that _they_ could as well.

Seeing these students, Suga knows _exactly_ why that would cause alarm.

One of the students in the back mumbles something that Suga doesn't catch but - as this one seems relatively normal apart from his poorly coloured hair - he smiles at him. "What was that, sorry?"

The student looks at his hands, then the floor. "You took out a demon army with your magic last year. There were tentacles."

Every eye in the class swings forward onto Suga.

That one is trouble. "That's not really..." he trails off. He would have left that fight to other people except that demon army was about to track through his forest and he's spent too long working out what mushrooms grow where to pack up and move to a different one. He might enjoy black magic but he can't earn money off it without making life difficult. "It wasn't precisely _black_ magic." He can feel Sawamura-san raising an eyebrow beside him and he suppresses the urge to step on his foot. Or summon something to step on his foot.

"So we can do black magic so long as it's stuff like that?" asks the first student with the sword.

The second one snorts.

"No," Suga says.

"But why not?"

Because Suga likes a peaceful world where he doesn't have to worry about the city getting dragged onto another plane of existence because he took a nap. "Because you could get hurt."

Suga's lesson doesn't get any better from there. He eventually manages to convince most of the class that it wasn't 'totally awesome' that nothing will grow for years on the site where Suga cleared the demon army. But the two students with the sword and the bow - Hinata and Kageyama, Sawamura-san tells him later - hold the class up for half an hour going around in circles of rationalising why there might be some cause for them to need to know how to summon 'just a tiny terror, really it wouldn't have to be a big one'. Eventually, they agree not to call forth disaster lords from realms unknown and class is dismissed.

"Sorry about them, you know how they can be at that age," Sawamura-san says as the last of them exits to the lunch hall.

"Only too well, I think I might have actually been worse. I did end up going through with practising the dark arts after all," Suga says with a smile and he catches Sawamura-san giving him a calculated look.

Suga raises an eyebrow and Sawamura looks away, bashful, and clears his throat. "You don't look like a dark mage."

A reaction Suga has received many times before. "And what do you think a dark mage should look like?"

"Well." Suga can practically see portraits of their great and benevolent overlord Oikawa-sama flashing through his mind. "You're more attractive." He clears his throat, again. "And I don't feel like I should be putting what I teach into practice with you."

Suga laughs and draws a line of energy through the air. Daichi jumps back and then looks sheepish for doing so. "There isn't much you can do against black magic, honestly. Not if you don't want to use it yourself, that is."

\----

He spends the rest of his day picking up supplies he was running low on, stopping in at medicinal stores to work out what's in demand and mark down some orders for his wares. In one store he finds the student with the poorly coloured hair tucked on a stool with a book, away from the counter, while the store keeper hands him items with instructions like 'give this a boost, Kenma' before tucking them into a bag for their customers. A white mage, then. Suga should have known.

He passes a tavern just starting to get crowded when Sawamura all but falls into him. Suga steadies him by the arm as Sawamura catches his breath.

"Thank the gods, you're still here. Those idiots-" he breaks off to try another attempt at regaining his breath. "Please come, they're in the library. Up until 'library' Suga thought 'those idiots' must refer to Hinata and Kageyama now he's not quite sure, but if it _is_ them, the situation is dire.

They run together back towards the school and Suga makes a note to try harder to keep in shape. Far away from the city, it's easy to use his magic for fast transportation and even this run is making him pant.

Sawamura leads him into the library which has pools of black magic oozing out from under the door.

"It wasn't this bad when I left," he says as Suga pushes up his sleeves.

He kicks at the largest puddle of darkness and it dissipates. He purses his lips. "I'm sure it wasn't," he says and inches open the door.

Inside, Suga knows the light emitting orbs they use in the library to prevent fire are still glowing their hardest, but they're barely visible. The library ceiling isn't that high. One of the shadows has eyes and they're looking at him.

Behind rows of shelves, he hears someone squeak. "I _told_ you we shouldn't do this in here!"

"Tch, so we should have done it in the stables like you wanted?"

Suga rounds the shelves trying to pinpoint their voices. If their magic had gone _well_ it would be easy. But their clouded and murky magic forces his out and, when he's not at the source, Suga doesn't know if it's the kind that will shut itself down or grow in power if he starts poking at it.

"Do you understand now, why you shouldn't have tried this?" He stands on something that crunches then vanishes with a sound like striking a match.

The two fall silent.

"Start talking or I might never find you," he says and makes his way closer.

"Sorry, Sugawara-sensei. Kageyama just wouldn't shut up about how I couldn't-"

"I said you _shouldn't_ , not that you couldn't. Any idiot could do this." Kageyama must wave his hand around because one of the faint lamps blinks out and reappears. Suga changes his course slightly towards them. He's actually wrong, not everyone could manage to summon this much magic on their first try. That's one thing that Suga argued for telling the students but was shut down. Often when black magic goes awry all that happens is the user ends up dead. This result is more impressive.

"Yeah, well, _you_ couldn't do it at all, so shut up."

"Please don't, I'm nearly there." Hinata is wrong about Kageyama not having done anything with the magic. Most of it is Hinata's, but traces of magic belonging to Kageyama bolster it.

"If you'd let me practice more I would have-" Suga claps his hand down on Kageyama's shoulder before he can finish explaining what volumes of monstrosity he could have summoned with more practice.

" _Now_ , you can shut up."

Suga thinks he hears Kageyama's teeth click as he snaps his jaw shut.

Next to the two of them, with a hand on each of their shoulders - all four. Which he's sure will make shivers run down their spines if they ever have cause to use their brains. "I can make this go away but I could also go back home and leave you to to descend into madness. Unless you promise to never touch this again."

"I won't!" Hinata says immediately. "We won't. Right, Kageyama?" There's a pause, but Kageyama grunts. "That means yes," Hinata says to confirm Suga's assessment.

Suga grins and Hinata must see his teeth in the darkness because he shrinks down further.

Clearing Hinata and Kageyama's mess doesn't take more than a minute from his position between them, but it feels much longer with the magic distorting time. He unwinds coils of power and tucks them back away into their proper dimensions as efficiently as he can. Even so, by the end, dark circles line his eyes and he looks much closer to a corpse or Sawamura's picture of a black mage than his usual self.

He's vaguely aware, as he sits down on the edge of a library table, of Sawamura rushing in and giving his two students the dressing down of a lifetime but he drifts off before the end.

\----

Suga wakes up in a bed with blankets tucked in to the point of suffocation. Thankfully, wriggling his shoulders pulls one corner loose and he draws in a deep breath. He stares at the beams in the ceiling for a minute when Sawamura opens the door with a tray in his hands.

"Thank the gods," that's the second time he's started a conversation that way, "I thought you might have been pulled into one of those dark realms."

Suga chuckles, "Not at all, it's often more difficult to clean up inexperienced mess than actual destruction, silly as it sounds." He yawns and Sawamura sets the tray on the small table beside the bed. "How long was I asleep?"

"Just through the night."

Suga raises an eyebrow and Sawamura looks away, just like he did the last time. "Awfully quick to worry, Sawamura-san."

Sawamura clears his throat. "I may have taken a liking to you."

Suga laughs. He won't be taking lessons again any time soon, but he might make a point to drop by the city for other reasons.


End file.
